sociology of law

Topic: Criminal Law, Race and the War on

Drugs Alexander, Michelle. 2012. The New Jim Crow. The New Press.

Read Chapter: Introduction

Outline • Social control theory • Race, the war on drugs, and social control theory • Connection to Du Bois • Class activity

Social control theory “The impact of the drug war has been astounding. In less than thirty years, the U.S penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase.7 The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfi ng the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran. In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the United States, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000.” http://www.drugpolicy.org/issues/race-and-drug-war

Social control theory • “It may be surprising to some that drug crime was declining, not

rising, when a drug war was declared. From a historical perspective, however, the lack of correlation between crime and punishment is nothing new.” • “Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use

punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns.” • Social control theory = dominant social groups use punitive

laws/policies to control subordinate groups

Social control theory • “Between 1960 and 1990, for example, official crime rates in Finland,

Germany, and the United States were close to identical. Yet the U.S. incarceration rate quadrupled, the Finnish rate fell by 60 percent, and the German rate was stable in that period. Despite similar crime rates, each government chose to impose different levels of punishment” • Why?

Social control theory • “Between 1960 and 1990, for example, official crime rates in Finland,

Germany, and the United States were close to identical. Yet the U.S. incarceration rate quadrupled, the Finnish rate fell by 60 percent, and the German rate was stable in that period. Despite similar crime rates, each government chose to impose different levels of punishment” • Why?

Race, the war on drugs, and social control theory Race relations as social conflict https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNSX8qZeSxc&t=3195s 14-27 min https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_United_Sta tes War on drugs / mass incarceration as system of racialized social control https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nix on-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html

Race, the war on drugs, and social control theory “I use the term racial caste in this book the way it is used in common parlance to denote a stigmatized racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom. Jim Crow and slavery were caste systems. So is our current system of mass incarceration”

i.e. the war on drugs functions as a system of social control for a racial caste system

Connection to Du Bois

Connection to Du Bois “That is the basic message that Martin Luther King Jr. aimed to deliver through the Poor People’s Movement back in 1968. He argued then that the time had come for racial justice advocates to shift from a civil rights to a human rights paradigm, and that the real work of movement building had only just begun. A human rights approach, he believed, would offer far greater hope for those of us determined to create a thriving, multiracial, multiethnic democracy free from racial hierarchy than the civil rights model had provided to date. It would offer a positive vision of what we can strive for—a society in which all human beings of all races are treated with dignity, and have the right to food, shelter, health care, education, and security. This expansive vision could open the door to meaningful alliances between poor and working-class people of all colors, who could begin to see their interests as aligned, rather than in conflict—no longer in competition for scarce resources in a zero-sum game.”

Connection to Du Bois Why does Alexander define justice as a multiracial democracy “in which all human beings of all races are treated with dignity, and have the right to food, shelter, health care, education, and security”?

Why does she begin with dignity? Insert superpredator quote

In class activity - Upload to blackboard individually

• Working with your group, write a 200 word policy position on New Jersey marijuana law • Your team will be one of three groups advocating for the following

policies: • Legalization proponents argue that prohibition is the cause of the drug problem

and that regulating drug trade will help decrease crime. They also see legalization as a means for reducing drug enforcement costs and increasing tax revenue and job opportunities. • Decriminalization proponents argue that while drug use should not be legal in

all cases, it should be treated as a public health problem not a criminal activity. This view changes the way that law enforcement would deal with the problem. • New policy under current system: some of the tenants of the current system

are listed above. These policies favor the criminalization of certain substances with penalties including fines and jail time.

In class activity - Upload to blackboard individually

• Same system new laws, example: Trump administration’s two positions - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO6Wy_urph8&t=301s https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/11/16/what-s-really-in-the-fi rst-step-act

• Legalization example: • Bernie Sanders campaign’s position –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bn8vPvL72ek&t=586s at 6:20 https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/24/20930422/berni e-sanders-marijuana-legalization-plan